Espresso: Innovative Web Development

There are a number of different web development tools available for Mac, ranging from mainstream juggernauts like Dreamweaver through to smaller apps such as Coda. Over the past few months, a new contender has gradually emerged on the scene – Espresso – developed by the minds behind the acclaimed CSSEdit.

Espresso aims to simplify the workflow of web designers, providing a streamlined set of tools and techniques which allow you to focus on designing. I found the feature set to include a great package of tools. Broken down into ‘Edit, Organize, Preview, Find, and Publish’, they cover the entire development process of a new site.

Edit & Preview

Visual editing has come an awfully long way since the days of coding a project in Notepad. Espresso uses the same text engine as CSSEdit to color your code in a readable and attractive fashion. It recognizes HTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript by default, with other languages supported through the extensibility features discussed shortly.

Edit & Preview

Another visual feature is that of the dynamic sidebar, which updates as you move through your code to reflect the tags surrounding the current position. This is a great way to keep context and diagnose problems with the structure of your markup.

Finally, the ability to ‘collapse’ sections of code can make managing a particular lengthy document much more straight forward. Moving your mouse over the line numbers adjacent to the markup allows you to collapse the content within any given tag, freeing up valuable screen space.

Organize & Find

Searching through code to find a particular section is a common occurrence made enjoyable by Espresso. Hitting Ctrl-F brings down a search bar, which dynamically highlights and shows the number of matches as you type. It isn’t a revolutionary new design, but is far more user friendly than using a pop-up window to search. Replacing is also remarkably straight forward (and undo-able if you make a mistake).

Organize & Find

Organizing documents is done through the Project and Workspace on the left. These show a clear hierarchy of the files in any given project, along with a separate section for those currently open. Tabs are not present per-se, but the Workspace is designed to be a replacement. Whilst a little different at first, this way of working felt natural after a few minutes of using Espresso.

One area where the interface is slightly lacking becomes apparent when opening multiple projects. This is handled through launching a completely new window for each project, a solution which leads to a fairly cluttered screen when working on several sites at a time. In the future, I would like to see a tab feature for managing different projects within the same window.

Publish

No self respecting web design tool would be complete without handling the process of moving your files to a server. In a similar way to Coda, Espresso removes the requirement of a seperate FTP application. From my limited testing, built in publishing support works excellently. Three different options are available;

Update: This uploads local documents and replaces or removes old documents on the server

Merge: Synchronize local and remote documents so each side has the latest versions of everything

Mirror: Similar to update, but removes all remote documents which don’t exist in the local project

These three options cover most of the eventualities you’ll face when publishing a site, and a remote file browser can be used if you need greater manual control.

Publish Files

Transferring files is speedy on account of the multiple connection support. The included protocols for publishing files are SFTP, FTP and Amazon S3. I would have appreciated an option to import settings from an app such as Transmit, though I’m probably demanding a little too much!

Extensibility

Extensibility

Espresso prides itself on extensibility – the ability to add new languages and features through an XML plugin architecture. Enjoyably called ‘Sugars’, a variety of plugins are in development. A site has already launched to catalogue these, with support for most major development languages already in place (PHP, Ruby, Django etc). Themes are also available to change the look and feel of the code area. I particularly like Cappuccino.

Conclusion

Whilst still a beta product, Espresso looks set to be a strong competitor to Coda. The interface is deliciously Mac-like, it has a powerful feature set, and the developers already know how to produce a successful development app. Future versions are set to offer full CSSEdit integration and I’m excited about playing with the final release.

Espresso requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or higher, and the public beta is time-limited (requiring regular updates). If you’d like to pre-order Espresso, you can do so for the price of 60€ (around $78) and a discount is available if you already own a CSSEdit license.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts – does Espresso seem like an app which could replace your current development setup, or is it still lacking in certain areas?

Popular Posts

Responses

This does look like a brilliant application. I currently use TextMate and can’t see anything replacing it as of yet, although in the future Espresso might be a likely candidate. I especially like the mirror part to publishing sites, as I often rename files or upload some dummy images for example, so that is a very interesting tool indeed!

January 30th

I currently use Coda (which I used to code this site) and feel the same way, I don’t really want to replace it since I love it and have grown really fond of it. However, I might take a look at Espresso and see if it’s worth the switch.

It’ll definitely be interesting to see whether Espresso tempts Coda users, as the two are fairly similar. I’m a personal fan of the simple TextWrangler approach, but enjoy the automated features of Espresso. It’s tempting!

January 30th

I tried TextWrangler but really couldn’t get behind it. I started coding HTML/CSS in Dreamweaver some years back and got use to the nice looking GUI. TextWrangler just makes me go uh… where’s the pizzaz? IDK Coda replaced Dreamweaver so I’m happy for that at least.

I use Coda and CSSEdit and would love to see the ability to use them both at the same time without things going, er, a little weird. I also use the SVN feature of Coda and will have to see if Espresso has the same feature… But most prohibitively it’s the cost. I’ve paid for Coda, Transmit, etc already. Buying something else isn’t worth it when I already own tools to do the job.

As an enormous fan of CSSEDit, I tried Espresso. It crashed on me, losing my work, and didn’t seem as good as Coda. To be frank, I don’t think much of Coda either. For now, I’m still sticking to TextMate, CSSEdit and Cyberduck.

I use TextMate but would happily switch to Espresso if the code folding were better… I really hope they fix it for the final version. Right now if you fold some code, it collapses all the lines and only displays (…). That doesn’t really help me – the TextMate approach is much better in that it displays the first line of the folded block and puts (…) behind the first line.

The feature I’m excited about is the advanced find and replace functionality: You can use regular expression and see the resulting matches in your document in realtime! That’s great news for people like me who don’t know enough about regular expressions to use them in other applications but would like to facilitate the power of it. Espresso makes it easy to fiddle around with your regex until it’s correct…

I’ve been using Coda for 2 years, and I was looking forward to Espresso. I’m in beta. Not sure what all I can really say, except that it has to really fix the publishing feature before I considering switching off of Coda. I would also like to see a project manager interface instead of the current setup.

So far, I’m not going to put the $ down, but if some updates in the future add a lot more functionality that I’m missing, I’ll consider it.

One feature I do enjoy is its auto-closing tag. Helps minimize losing how many divs you’re in.

I have been using Coda since it’s release. I love it, however, with recent releases, I’ve been having weird issues with publishing. So, I’m definitely going to give Espresso a hard look. Either way, I think Espresso coming to the scene is excellent for this space. Keeps innovation happening!

I’ve been with Espresso since the private beta, and it’s quickly getting better and better. You probably won’t see the full potential until they’ve opened up more of the app to Sugar developers. So while it may not seem that great compared to Coda just yet, by the time it’s released, it will be a force to be reckoned with.

The theming is great too. It’s just like writing CSS. (I made that Cappuccino theme btw :)

Sam

January 31st

Personnally I use Aptana Studio which is an interesting alternative to Dreamweaver or Coda. B

Have been using it for a while now and it’s a great product. Never been a fan of Coda, so still edited my files in GoLive (I only needed the ability to quickly put in/replace code, and it wasn’t worth the upgrade to Dreamweaver for that alone). I now use Espresso for everything (except CSS editing of course; CSSEdit all the way there) and even though it’s a beta, I love it.

Along the way to 1.0 the features will expand and new ones will be added, so I don’t see why I should stop using it if it’s only going to get more awesome! (Oh, and I have no complaints about the price. I live in the Netherlands, so I pay the euro price. 234-0 € vs. $ .. :P)

I love this app. While I tried to give Coda a chance, I just had to switch back to Espresso. This may be because I didn’t really use Coda before Espresso (sadly I was on Dreamweaver, not really sure how I survived that). Many people are saying that they cannot make the switch from Coda, probably because they are so used to the way Coda handles things. While the apps seem quite similar on the surface, they are actually quite different. Coda just seems so bulky to me compared to Espresso. Espresso has saved me so much time by just working in the background for me. Coda seemed to auto-complete tags when I did not need to, and this just bothered me. Other things that I really like about Espresso are of course the folding tags, Quick Publish (which publishes on save instead of at the press of a button like Coda), and Sugars. I would definately recommend Espresso for someone who has not used Coda before and wants a simple text editor that will work for you rather than against you.